AMD's Chief Technical Officer: 'We're enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI'

It's the tiniest of teases and opens up a whole trunk full of questions, but in a recent online interview, Mark Papermaster was asked what the year has in store for AMD. The CTO's response was all focused on AI, naturally, but he also mentioned a curious little tidbit: its gaming devices are to get AI-based upscaling and 2024 is likely to be the year we'll see it.

The discussion with YouTube channel No Priors (via Videocardz) is mostly about AMD's position and thoughts on machine learning, cloud computing, and other big-money sectors. It's a good chat between the hosts and Papermaster, although a little dry if you're not interested in those specific topics.

However, the CTO's closing remarks on AMD's plans for 2024 are certainly of interest to gamers, all thanks to the brief comment on how the chip giant is bringing AI upscaling to its gaming devices.

«Well, this for us is a huge year because we have spent so many years developing our hardware and software capabilities for AI,» Papermaster begins. «We've just completed AI enabling our entire portfolio: Cloud, edge, PCs, embedded devices, our gaming devices. We're enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI and 2024 is really a huge deployment year for us.»

At the moment, AI upscaling is the preserve of Intel and Nvidia. Both companies use a two-stage upscaling process, where the first step is to run an image scaler via shaders to change the rendered frame's resolution up to the monitor's level. The second step involves the application of a neural network, to tidy up the image, removing any glitches created by the upscaling process.

The mathematical operations involved to do this can be run on shaders but in the case of DLSS and the Intel Arc-only version of XeSS, it's handled by dedicated matrix units in the GPU to get the best performance and visual results. The graphics chips used in AMD's Radeon models do all calculations via the Compute Units (CU), hence why FSR doesn't involve an AI step to tidy up the